Hello. As I'm writing this I am studying for my exams which are happening as you read this, so let's cut to the chase; it's the WiiLink News!

Links yet not bonded

Do you remember Forming Links? If you don't, it was a segment where I would interview WiiLink creators about a certain subject, getting into various topics around it. The segment was one of my favourites, and it hasn't been cancelled! However, it hasn't gotten an issue since December 2025. I have been fairly busy to write these columns, but we did record one issue in June. The reason why it isn't out? It's so goddamn long. Usually, a Forming Links interview recording is around 25 minutes. At the longest, it's been 45 minutes in the Homebrew Tea article, because Ryal and Kolton deliberately derailed the interview to be funny. This upcoming interview is 70 minutes. So, it's taking a bit longer to make it into a full script. We suspect we can release this in August's newsletter, but we can't guarantee anything. The interview itself has been one of my favorites, so please stay tuned!

End of the written word

In May 2025, we introduced the WiiLink GUI Patcher. This gave the WiiLink Patcher a brand new user interface, making it easier than ever to enter the WiiLink ecosystem. While this is the definitive WiiLink Patcher experience, we still had the old command line patcher available on the website. Some people prefer a command line, and it did us no harm to support it. However, as we continue to develop and build new things, it has become more of a hassle to keep supporting the command line patcher and make sure it works at all times. As such, we've decided to discontinue the command line patcher on September 31, 2026. This won't affect the main patcher, and no other WiiLink services will be affected by this change. Thank you for using the command line patcher for so long!

That being said, we know the command line patcher may have been useful to some of you who couldn't run the GUI patcher on your device. The patcher is officially supported on Windows, macOS and Linux, but what if you don't have that? Well, Harry's written a guide for anyone who might not have a compatible computer, but does have a Android phone or a Chromebook! We hope this can address the concerns of some users out there.

Picture this

Last month, we introduced Wii Room's Picture of the Day. This is a new feature on Wii Room, which shows the player a new community-submitted photo every day. However, because of how this works, you can't really check any of the previously shown pictures freely. And some of these photos are like, really, really good. We don't want to just get rid of them either. So, we've come up with a solution that should satisfy everyone!

We've made a new Bluesky page! There's a new account on Bluesky with the handle @photos.wiilink.ca which posts a new picture every day. This is slightly delayed from Wii Room's rotation (as of writing, it is 9 days behind), so the newest pictures will always be found on Wii Room. The posts all mention the day when it was shown, so you can just look up the date while searching to find the exact photo you're looking for. And even if you're not using Wii Room, it's a nice reminder to go outside every day! Remember how every Wii game reminded you to do that?

Introduction to Reintroduction

Back in 2024, we made a general trailer to give a quick recap to all new users about what WiiLink does. We made this for PJKT, and since we had another PJKT last month, we made another set of trailers! This time we have three, separated by what they do. We have trailers for general WiiConnect24 features, real world connections, as well as a full tour of Wii Room.

My next guest kind of freaks me out

Creator Spotlight has been a particular favorite part of Wii Room to us since we opened the category with Ace Detective: Ace Detective and Old Space last month. This month, another short joins that list: The Bedroom Talkshow. This new short features Dave, the host of the show, interviewing quite an animated character. It's quite a unique little short, and we think it's pretty fun. The Bedroom Talkshow is available now on Wii Room's Creator Spotlight.

We art to do something

Earlier in the month, we put out a post looking for artists to help us out with a project! We can't announce just yet what this is for, but we'll be slowly developing this project throughout the coming months. Stay tuned for more information!

The kettle's on

After nearly a year long hiatus, Homebrew Tea returns! Kolton is back and he's reporting all the latest homebrew happenings. This episode brings in some new segments, and reintroduces the show for the first time in a year! Please make sure to bring your customary edible Honda Civic.

This month's episode also features the first ever exclusive preview of a homebrew project! Paper Mario: The Sticker Comet, an upcoming Paper Mario: Sticker Star mod was featured in this episode to showcase some previously unseen features. You can watch the full episode on Wii Room, but you can also watch that particular segment on YouTube here.

Signal found

Have you ever heard about WebTV? It was a service that started in the 90s, and it was a device that would let you interact with the internet directly from the TV. While most TVs now can connect to the internet, this was meant to be an actual communication and browsing device! Well, while this service was discontinued in 2013, a revival service by the name of WebTV Redialed exists, and gets those systems working again! It's a pretty neat trick, and we figured people who are interested in our service might enjoy them too. As a collaboration, WebTV Redialed will soon be getting a room in Wii Room! More details will be announced as progress is made, so stay tuned.

Multilingual suffering

So this isn't relevant to most of you, but let's talk about this because it's important. For a while, we've been trying really hard to get Wii Room region exclusive servers. This effort goes as far back as early 2025, where our localization team wanted to have the content of the channel localized, not just the channel text. This is why alternate backends were made, with all languages getting their own "Underground" Wii Room web panel. There was one problem with this: it broke literally everything. Yes, this groundbreaking new feature took up so much server space that it basically killed the idea of maintaining our servers. Additionally, unbeknownst to us was the fact that this backend change was already reflecting on the frontend. This meant that literally anyone not using English on their Wii couldn't use Wii Room at all because there was no content on it. With international Wii Room being an unproven concept, as well as all the problems this change had created, we decided to take a step back.

Now, there was one region that survived: Japan. Japan is the birth place of Wii Room, so naturally it makes sense that it should get its own servers above everything else. And knowing that Wii Room was not currently working in Japan, we got to work uploading things to the Japanese backend. But then we realized: all the backends work differently from each other. Because they are treated completely differently, they have different settings and restrictions. This meant things that would work on the English channel didn't work on the Japanese channel. This included saving some things, which made it literally impossible to get Wii Room working in Japan. This went on for about 8 months, I think.

That's all changed this month! Thanks to a new system developed by Sketch, all languages now go through one single backend. Instead of everything working through different websites and systems, all content uploaded now is "tagged" in a specific language. So if you load Wii Room either through Japanese or English, it'll be loading from the same place, but only show the content that's "tagged" to your language. This also means that:

Japan, now coming to Japan

Wii Room Japan is now live! Because of how long Wii Room took to bring to Japan, we wanted to make sure that it's open as soon as possible. We decided the best way to do this is to release the channel as an Open Access Beta. This means the channel is opening with minimal content, with us doing regular content drops to slowly form into what we think is a complete Wii Room experience.

Wii Room Japan's Open Access Beta started on July 6th, exactly 2 years after Wii Room Japan's launch! (I guess that's our anniversary launch for this year?) Every Monday, Wednesday and Friday we're uploading new episodes of Nintendo's Wii Room original shows, with other content being uploaded whenever possible. We've also taken this moment to reactivate the Japanese Bluesky account! The handle @jp.wiilink.ca now posts updates on Wii Room Japan whenever they happen.

Now, this is all great news, but there's one problem.

I am dying

With all these new content implementations, we have not really expanded the content team to accommodate it. This works for things that we have to set up once and then automate like with Wii Room's Picture of the Day, but things like the PotD Bluesky account, the Japanese social media, the entirety of the Japanese Wii Room, all require daily attention. Most of this work has had to come down to myself, as I am a content lead and a Japanese localizer. multilingual content management holds a couple of very distinct but major issues compared to standard content management:

• Because the content team is primarily composed of English speakers, they can't contribute to international content management

• Because localizers were brought on to do primarily long, technical work for Wii Channels, they do not have the time for more consistent, shorter translations that international content management requires

• Because of cultural differences and different interests, other language Wii Room's shouldn't be run the exact same way as the English variant, and needs people familiar with the language's userbase

This is a new kind of work we've never had to do before, where instead of all languages descending from English, all languages need to act independently of each other. To actually make the other languages viable, they can't have to answer to the English team; that would slow everything down to a crawl. We can't keep using the same system, instead we need to use something completely new. So we're doing just that.

We've started to develop our own WiiLink International Content Team. This team's purpose is to be a separate entity from our existing English Content Team, making their own decisions and acting of their own accord to deliver content to other languages. This strategy is completely new to us, so we're not immediately establishing teams for a myriad of languages; instead just looking for two. Japanese and Brazilian Portuguese. This choice comes down to logistics, with myself being Japanese and a Content Lead, and our Brazilian Portuguese localizer Jinjo happening to be knowledgeable on the Content Team. If this ends up working out, we'll try to establish other language teams as well, but we'll do it very carefully to make sure it doesn't go out of hand.

We'll keep you updated on where this goes, but we're really excited for this big change. if anything, I'm excited because I get to do less work. I can hang around in the office drinking margaritas all day! Although, we don't have an office. Hey Sketch can we get an office?

And that is this month's news! It's really been quite an eventful month here at WiiLink, but as you can see we're always trying to make WiiLink work better long term, and make sure this is a sustainable project that can keep doing really cool stuff even 10 years from now.

Now I must leave. I need to go write a report. Or play Denshattack. That game's awesome.